The next day François duly presented himself at the palace at twelve o’clock for breakfast with the Bishop. Much to his disgust, the General was present. François, who loved to fool people, assumed an air and tone of extreme virtue, and again told, with many additions, a pretty story of his reverses and his determination to earn an honest living by doing juggling and acrobating, the only things he knew how to do by which a franc could be earned. The good Bishop was lost in admiration of François, and said:
“That, my dear M. le Bourgeois, as you call yourself, is the highest form of virtue and respectability, is it not, my brother?”
General Bion maintained a stiff silence, which annoyed the good Bishop exceedingly.
The General meant to sit François out, not doubting that he would contrive to borrow a small sum of money from the Bishop before leaving. But François held his ground, as his ancestors had held theirs on many a hard-fought field, and the General, called away by his military duties, had to leave the wolf in conversation with the lamb. He left a deputy, however, in the person of Mathilde, the Bishop’s housekeeper, an angular and ferocious person of sixty, who disapproved of the Bishop’s fondness for picking up stray acquaintances and lost dogs and cats and giving them the hospitality of the palace.
When François and the Bishop were left alone in the Bishop’s study, then François laid himself out to amuse his host. Soon he had the Bishop roaring with laughter over jokes and merry stories, and at two o’clock it was as much as François could do to tear himself away.
By the time he was out of the room Mathilde had stalked in and proceeded to give the Bishop a piece of her mind.
“Does your Grace remember,” she asked wrathfully, “the last adventurer your Grace took up with, who borrowed ninety francs of your Grace and then skipped off to Paris?”
“Yes, my good Mathilde, I know,” responded the Bishop, using a soft answer to turn away wrath. “But this gentleman, you see—for he is a gentleman—belongs to a family which were exceedingly kind to my family, and especially my father. He was a laborer upon the estates of this gentleman’s father. Think of it!”
“That shows,” cried Mathilde, “what a good-for-nothing scamp he must have been. Who ever saw a gentleman standing on his head, like this fellow does, and playing tricks with cards? I kept my hand upon my purse in my pocket all the time I was serving the General and your Grace and this ragamuffin at breakfast.”
“Mathilde,” said the Bishop, trying to be stern, “I cannot permit you to call a guest in my house a ragamuffin.”
“Then,” cried Mathilde, “I will give him his right name, and call him a rapscallion!” And then she flounced out of the room, banging the door after her.
The Bishop sighed. He was a celibate, and yet he was henpecked worse than any man in Bienville.
François, listening outside, walked away laughing and resolving to pay off Mathilde for knowing the truth about him.
Two days after that, François again met the Bishop face to face in the street in front of the palace, and was warmly greeted. François, eying the clock in the cathedral steeple, saw that it was ten minutes of twelve, and remembering the history of Scheherezade and the Arabian Nights, began telling his crack story to the Bishop. In the midst of it came the bells announcing noon, and the odor of broiled chops from the kitchen window of the old stone house known as the palace. The Bishop, like other men, was subject to temptation, and he could not do without the end of the story, and besides he had always that excellent excuse that his father had been a laborer upon the estates of François’ father.
“Come in,” said the Bishop, “and have breakfast with me. My brother will not be here.”
“Thank God,” replied François. “Now, if you could get rid of that old battleaxe of a housekeeper while we are at breakfast, it would be better still.”
“That I can’t do,” said the Bishop ruefully. “But after all, she is a good creature, and my brother, the General, says it if were not for Mathilde I would never have a sous in my pocket or a coat to my back.”
“He is probably right,” answered François, taking the Bishop by the arm as they marched up the steps. “It is your cursed good nature that will always be giving you trouble.”
François’ reception at the hands of Mathilde was a trifle more hostile than before.
There are some tricks of legerdemain which can be played without the aid of a confederate. In the midst of the breakfast, while François was telling some of his best stories, the Bishop inadvertently took his purse from his pocket with his handkerchief, and left the purse lying on the table. When breakfast was over, the purse was missing.
Mathilde assumed an air of triumph, and the Bishop looked very sheepish. At once a search wits begun, Mathilde shaking the cloth, looking under the chair occupied by François, and doing everything except rifling his pockets. The purse contained eighty francs, a large sum for the poor Bishop, who lived from hand to mouth. In the hunt the dining room soon looked as if a cyclone had struck it; drawers were pulled open, chairs knocked about, and Mathilde watched François with a hawk’s eye.
“That is a good bit of money to let lie around in the presence of a servant,” said François, impudently. “Come now, you woman, haven’t you got that purse in your pocket this moment?”
Mathilde, furious, thrust her hand into her own pocket where she carried a handkerchief, a notebook, a large bunch of keys, a prayer-book, a rosary, and a little figure of St. Joseph in a tin case, and her own purse. But what she brought out of her pocket was the Bishop’s purse. The Bishop laughed long and loud, and François laughed louder than the Bishop.
After this was over, the Bishop invited François into the study. François, in addition to telling some of his best stories, proceeded to go through some of his most comic antics. The good Bishop laughed until he cried, and excused himself on that ever excellent plea about his father being a laborer on the estates of François’ father. Then François went to a wheezy old piano in the room and began to play and sing some simple old songs of the Bishop’s youth—the songs his mother had sung to him in the laborer’s cottage in the meadows. Presently the tears were trickling down the Bishop’s face.
“Go on, M. le Bourgeois,” he said tremulously. “I love those simple old airs that take me back to my childhood when my good mother worked for us all day, and then had the heart to sing to us in the evening. As you sing, I can hear in my heart the tinkling of the cow-bells and the sharp little cries of the birds under the thatched roof—for our roof was only thatch, you remember. Oh, my mother, my dear, dear mother! Her hands were hard with toil, her back was bent with hanging over washing-tubs and the soup pot on the fire; but in Heaven I know she is straight and soft of hand, and one day all her children will surround her and pay her homage as if she, the peasant mother, were a queen!”
François continued to play soft chords, the Bishop listening and sighing and smiling. Presently François heard from the Bishop’s big chair a gentle snore. Then François, rising noiselessly, pulled off his own shoes, which were cracked, and with professional sleight-of-hand took off the Bishop’s new shoes, which he put on his own feet, and then slipped his own shoes on the Bishop’s feet. There was a desk in the room, and François scribbled on a piece of paper, “I would have taken your Grace’s stockings, but they are cotton. If I were a bishop, I would wear silk stockings. I hope your Grace will remedy this impropriety, and in the future wear silk stockings worth the taking.” This scrap of paper he pinned to the Bishop’s cassock, and went softly out through a door opening on a balcony, from which he swung himself down into the garden. As he walked along, he saw a row of beehives on a bench. Stepping gently, he took off his coat and threw it over a beehive, and then lifting it carried it out into the street. A policeman stopped him, saying:
“What have you got there, my man?”
“A beehive,” replied François, “just out of a hothouse, and the bees very active.”
The policeman suddenly backed off, and François marched away with his beehive, which he subsequently threw over the stone wall around the Bishop’s garden.
Meanwhile the Bishop waked, and reading the piece of paper, looked down at his feet to find full confirmation of François’ words. In the midst of it, Mathilde tore into the room.
“Well, your Grace,” bawled Mathilde, “what does your Grace think of your rowdy friend now? He stole a beehive off the bench as he went by. Pierre, the cobbler’s boy, was passing and saw him and told the cook who told the footman who told me, and I went out, and the beehive is gone! And look at your Grace’s feet! The wretch actually stole your Grace’s shoes!”
“Why do you speak with such violence?” said the Bishop, loath to lose, for a single pair of shoes and a beehive, the joy of François’ company. “Suppose I meet a man whom I have known as a boy, when I was in very humble circumstances and he was very high up in the world, and suppose that man’s shoes are worn, and I choose to give him a good pair and take his in return? Is that anybody’s business except my own? And suppose I gave him the beehive by way of a joke, you know?”
“It would be exactly like your Grace,” snapped Mathilde. “But it was the only good pair of shoes your Grace had in the world, and I shall have to go out into the town immediately to buy your Grace another pair.”
“Do,” said the Bishop, delighted to get rid of Mathilde on any terms.
When the door had slammed after the excellent Mathilde, the Bishop drew a long sigh of relief.
“I did not tell a single lie,” he said to himself; “I merely stated a hypothetical case. After all, the poor fellow needed the shoes, and he turned it into a pleasantry. I owed him that much for the hearty laughs he gave me, and for singing my mother’s old songs to me.”
The Bishop was always meeting François in the street after that; it was as if François were lying in wait for him, and by the simple expedient of beginning a good story, or intimating that he had a merry song, just as they reached the gates of the Bishop’s palace, François could always get a meal.
The affair of the purse had made Mathilde his mortal enemy, and she complained to the General that the Bishop was giving scandal by having that acrobat and juggler, François What’s-his-name, to breakfast at the palace about three times a week. General Bion, who was punctilious beyond any maiden lady in Bienville, felt it his duty to remonstrate with his brother about having François so often at the palace.
“But, my brother,” mildly urged the Bishop, “you would not have me, the son of our father, a laborer, uppish to the son of the Count d’Artignac. And besides, François has a good heart, and I am trying to bring him to penitence and to leave his present uncertain mode of life and to settle down somewhere. I think he is very amenable to grace, and I shall succeed in doing much with him. And then, he sings to me the songs our mother sang—ah, me!”
The General was silenced for the time, but Mathilde gave him privately some valuable information. It was true that whenever she came into the study François was always talking about his soul, and his desire to repent. But as soon as her back was turned she could hear sounds of laughter—François was none too good to be laughing at her—and sometimes she thought she heard the patter of feet, like dancing. It could not be his Grace. If the General could pay an unexpected call some day after François had breakfasted at the palace—
The General took the hint, and one day when he had seen François going into the palace arm in arm with the Bishop, the General bided his time. When he knew breakfast was over, he unceremoniously opened the door of the Bishop’s study. Mathilde was close behind him. There sat the Bishop in his great arm-chair, his hands crossed upon his waistcoat his mouth open as if it were on hinges, while François, in a ballet costume improvised from a table-cloth, was doing a beautiful skirt dance and carolling at the top of his lungs one of the gayest of the music hall songs. The entrance of the General was like a paralytic shock. The Bishop forgot to close his mouth, and François stood with one leg in the air.
“Good morning, brother,” said General Bion sarcastically. “So this is bringing M. le Bourgeois to penitence and reforming his wandering life. I am afraid he is laying up material for you as a penitent.”
The poor Bishop knew not where to look nor what to say, but François, with unblushing impudence, ran behind the General, caught Mathilde in his arms, and proceeded to do a high kicking waltz with her, in spite of her screams and protests and fighting like a tiger. Not even the General could stand that with gravity; he laughed in spite of himself. After that day, when François breakfasted at the palace the General had a way of dropping in, and there would be an audience of two instead of one to the antics of François in the good Bishop’s study.
Meanwhile, things went on in the lodgings opposite the Hotel Metropole without the slightest change. The Marquis still haunted the place, and Diane still gave him rare interviews in the presence of Madame Grandin. François chaffed her unmercifully about this prudery, but Jean encouraged her.
“Don’t let that man see you alone,” said Jean sternly to Diane. “A marquis and a cheap music-hall singer is a bad combination.”
“It is because you are jealous, Jean,” said Diane frankly, at which Jean looked at her with an expression so piteous, so heartrending, in his honest eyes, that even Diane was touched.
One afternoon about three weeks after Diane’s adventure in the maze with the Marquis, it was the same sort of an afternoon, the white fog from the river enveloping the town like a muslin veil, and making a mysterious light that was neither day nor night, darkness nor light.
Diane, on going out for her walk, determined to live over that hour of tumultuous joy in the maze, to indulge her imagination in the notion that there she should meet the Marquis. She started out, therefore, tripping lightly along, and made straight for the park. Once more she entered the wide driveway, half veiled in the floating white mist, and with an unerring instinct, she found the opening to the maze. As she walked between the tall, green walls of the clipped cedars, she felt a hand laid on her shoulder, and looking up, there was Egmont, his military cap sitting, as ever, jauntily on his handsome head, his cavalry cloak draped about him like the mantle of a young Greek.
“I caught sight of you as you came out of the house, and I followed you here. Don’t you suppose that I have lived over in imagination the half-hour we spent in this place? And then think how tantalizing it is to sit up in that stuffy room and talk to you across the table in the presence of that silly creature, Madame Grandin.”
“She isn’t silly, she is one of the best women-jugglers in the profession,” answered Diane, loyal and illogical as ever.
There was no resisting him on the part of poor Diane, and presently they were sitting on the bench together, Diane’s soft, cool cheek resting against the Marquis’ mustache. Presently he said:
“Now, what do you suppose I followed you here for, besides these sweet kisses? Your obstinacy has conquered at last. Will you be my wife, Diane?”
Diane gave a great gasp, and before Egmont knew what she was doing, she had slipped to the damp ground and was kneeling against him, weeping and laughing.
“Do you mean it? Do you really mean it?” she was crying.
“Of course I mean it,” said the Marquis, lifting her up once more on the bench beside him. “You are one of those women, Diane, who can make their own terms with men.”
“I will never be the least trouble to you,” said Diane, still weeping; “I never will be in your way; I will never utter a complaint. I know what it means for you, but I will efface myself. I will go to live in a hovel in the country if you like. All I ask is a little love.”
“That you shall have,” said the Marquis, kissing her red lips. “Not a little, but an immense deal. And as for living in the country, it is quite true, Diane, that you would be happier and better off living quietly and out of sight for a while, until you learn how to be a marquise. I am thirty years old, and I have no family, so there is no one to protest. The chateau of Egmont is leased, because, to tell you the truth, Diane, I am a poor man. But I have a little shooting-box an hour from Bienville where you could live very comfortably, eh, Diane? A little box of a house with a garden and lilac hedges around it, and a summer-house and some trees and fields and a little river where I often go to fish when I am off duty. Now if you were there—!”
The prospect was so dazzling to Diane that she had to close her eyes to see the splendid vision, and her lips could only whisper:
“A summer-house, a lilac hedge! Oh, glory, glory! One maid will be enough!”
When her first rapture of gratitude and joy was over, Diane, ever practical, said trembling:
“I am willing to live quietly and never to bother you, but I want my people, the Grandins and François and Jean, to know that I am really married to you. I could not live—I could not live, if they don’t know it.”
“Certainly,” answered the Marquis readily. “You see, I really belong in the district where the shooting-box lies. My Colonel will ask me questions, for an officer can’t get married on the sly, but trust me to manage that. Let me see, I can get three days’ leave three weeks from to-day; this is Saturday. You and I and Madame Grandin can go to the little place and the civil and religious ceremonies can both be performed the same day.”
“And M. Grandin and François and Jean can go too?” asked Diane anxiously.
“What’s the use?” replied Egmont. “Grandin will be certain to talk too much in that rumbling big voice of his, and create remark. As for François and that great, hulking Jean, I object to them decidedly. You will need two witnesses. Madame Grandin is one, and I can find another at my place.”
Diane remained silent; a great lump was rising in her throat. But the idea came into her mind, “This is the first thing he has asked me. Shall I refuse him and make it unpleasant for him when he is doing me the greatest honor in the world?”
They remained sitting on the bench and exchanging the sweet nothings of lovers until the faint sound of the church bell again startled Diane, when, as before, she rose and ran panting through the park and along the streets until she reached the lodgings. Once more she found them all at supper, and, as before, she sat pale and silent and eating no supper, but her eyes were glorified. Jean looked at her with a heavy heart; he knew without telling that she had seen the Marquis.
When supper was over, the table cleared away, and they were about starting for the little music hall, Diane, looking about her, said in her most dramatic manner:
“Listen, all of you. I said I knew something splendid would befall me in Bienville. It has come this afternoon. The Marquis Egmont de St. Angel asked me to marry him, to become his wife, to be a marquise. Oh, how glad I was!”
Madame Grandin clasped Diane in her arms, while Grandin sank on a chair overwhelmed with the magnificence of the thing. Neither Jean nor François spoke.
“I shall maintain a dignified silence with the reporters,” said Grandin, “and refuse to say a word upon the subject of whether Diane is to marry the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel or not. But I shall meanwhile write a circumstantial account of everything, mentioning all our names as frequently as possible, and send it to all the Paris newspapers, anonymously of course.”
François threw himself back in another chair and laughed uproariously.
“I always said, Skinny,” he cried, “that you were the most obstinate, pig-headed, impudent, determined creature that was ever on this planet. Here you have actually bullied a marquis into making you an offer of marriage!”
Jean, almost as pale as Diane, spoke composedly:
“I wish you happiness, Diane,” he said. “Now, tell us all about it.”
“We are to be married this day three weeks,” said Diane. “When I think of it I am so happy I feel as if I could fly. The Marquis has a little shooting-box an hour from here, and we are to drive there, the Marquis and I and Madame Grandin. She will be one of my witnesses, and the Marquis will provide the other. The civil and religious ceremonies will both take place the same day. The Marquis says his colonel will take a hand in the business, but that he can manage that.”
A slight chill fell upon all present. Diane, realizing it, blushed and felt every inch a traitor. Then Jean spoke:
“It seems to me, Diane,” he said, “that you ought to have some man friend with you, M. Grandin, for example. Not that I wish to go. Oh, no, not for a moment!”
As Jean said these words, his strong, clean-shaven face was distorted for an instant. Everybody knew that he least of any one in the world wished to see Diane married to another man.
“Diane is a quick study,” said François, laughing, “but it will take her all of three weeks to learn her part as a marquise. It is the best joke I ever heard—a joke on her, and on my cousin the Marquis, and on all of us!”
“I left it all to him,” said Diane, bursting into tears. “I could not find fault with him when he was doing me the greatest honor in the world, and he a marquis. And then,” she continued, recovering herself and speaking boldly, “I am as good as twelve men and a boy, anyhow to take care of myself.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” broke in Madame Grandin, cheerfully. “Marquises have their own way of doing things quite different from people like ourselves. The thing is, now, to get some one in Diane’s place and rehearse her so she can appear this night three weeks.”
At that Diane wept afresh. There was a strange shock in the thought of some one else in her place; she began to realize the tremendous dislocation of her life which was coming. This feeling grew upon her as she entered the little music hall, and she acted her part with extraordinary power, born of her beating heart, the tension of her soul.
When the performance was over, and she was putting on her hat in the little canvas den, she found herself trembling and weeping a little, and called to Jean in the next den, and he came to her.
“Oh, Jean!” she said, “think, in three weeks it will be the last time that I shall ever step upon the stage again! It will be the last time that I shall ever see those hundreds of eyes full of interest in me, and good will! It will be the last time that I shall make up and wear funny little short skirts, showing my ankles that are so nice! And I do so love to show my ankles! And it will be the last time that I shall ever see any of you as Diane, your fellow-player! After that, I shall be a marquise, the happiest person in the world, no doubt, but I shall never feel quite at ease with any of you again. I shall always be watching and thinking that I am being too kind to you or not kind enough. Oh, Jean!”
And then Diane did a strange thing for the happiest person in the world; she burst into a passion of tears.
“It’s enough to make you cry,” answered Jean stolidly. “You are being removed from one world into another. In our stage world everything goes right, and the villain is always punished before the curtain comes down. That’s why it is the theatre is a necessity of life; it represents the ideal world where the sinner always repents and is forgiven, and where lovers are always united in the end, and where the scoundrel is paid in full. We, who live in this ideal world, find the real world very dull in comparison.”
“That’s why, I suppose, I feel so badly about leaving the stage. But I never thought of anything to-day, when I felt Egmont’s arms around me and his lips were upon mine.”
Jean gave a strangled cry, and sat down heavily on the box which was the only seat in the little den.
“A man can’t stand everything, Diane!” he cried desperately. “In the name of God, don’t tell me anything more like that!”
“You mustn’t take it so hard, Jean,” said Diane, drying her eyes. “After all, I am only one woman out of millions and millions of them, and you are so nice and so good and act and sing so well, I am sure you could marry some girl much higher up in the profession than I am. And then, everybody has a thorn in the heart. Come, let us start home. The Marquis does not need to dog my steps now.”
The Grandins had already left, and Diane walked home between François, who joined them outside, and Jean. François called her Madame la Marquise, and made all sorts of good-natured fun of her. Jean was glum and silent.
When the two men parted with Diane on the landing and went up to their garret, their beds separated only with a canvas curtain, François slapped Jean on the back, and said:
“Never mind, old man! It’s easy enough to forget a woman.”
Jean turned on François a look of contempt.
Jean undressed quickly and laid down upon his hard bed, but not to sleep. He would not give François a chance to gibe at him next day about a sleepless night, and so lay rigidly still in the blackness of the long, low-ceiled garret.
He knew when it was one o’clock by the sound across the street of the closing of the Hotel Metropole, the banging of shutters, and the barring of gates. By some strange psychic intimation he knew that François, although perfectly quiet, was as wide awake as he. Presently, he heard strange sounds from the other side of the canvas partition, something like suppressed sobs and groans. Jean, thinking François was ill, drew aside a corner of the canvas at the end. François was huddled in a heap on the floor, clasping his knees and rocking back and forth, while strangled sobs and smothered cries burst from him. Jean, abashed, returned to his own bed.
The next morning, a bouquet of roses and a little note arrived from the Marquis. This gave unalloyed happiness to two persons—Diane and Grandin.
“A bouquet for a lady in my company from a marquis!” cried Grandin. “It’s enough to make a man mad with joy!”
Before breakfast Diane sallied forth, and came back bringing a book on etiquette which she immediately proceeded to study diligently.
When they all assembled for the twelve o’clock dinner, Diane could scarcely be torn away from her book.
“You see,” she said to the assembled table, “I have got to learn how to behave like a marquise—and all in three weeks.”
“You behave like a marquise!” said Jean, somewhat rudely, and laughing. “You will be about as comfortable as a mackerel in a gravel walk! Excuse me, Diane.”
“Yes, I will excuse you,” said Diane, serenely. “You have been so good to me for so long, and now I have but eighteen more performances with you.”
Her lips trembled a little at this, but she quickly resumed:
“The book says that a girl must never see her fiancé alone, and a fiancé should not call oftener than twice a week. That I shall arrange, and Madame Grandin will stay with me.”
At this, even Jean laughed.
“How about your trousseau, my dear?” asked François, “especially your court costumes?”
“That will have to come later,” replied Diane. “I shall be so busy seeing the Marquis, and studying up this book, and trying to help you with the new girl that I sha’n’t have time to get a regular trousseau. Besides, I don’t want to spend as much as three hundred and four francs, which I have now, in a hurry. It is a great deal of money, and I must think over it and look well about before I spend it. I have my nice white muslin trimmed with lace at fifteen sous the yard, and I can wash and iron it so beautifully it will look like new. I shall be obliged to buy a wedding veil and wreath, but, by looking around a little, I think I can get one for five or six francs. How amusing it will be when I am a marquise thinking about these things!”
Grandin set on foot plans to secure a young lady in Diane’s place. In this, he was immediately rewarded, and succeeded in getting Mademoiselle Rose le Roi, as she called herself, a strapping young woman, blonde and beautiful, and as tall as Jean, and exactly the opposite of Diane in every respect. In this, lay a pain new and sharp for Diane. She had hoped that Mademoiselle le Roi would prove excessively stupid. On the contrary, the young woman turned out to be very bright.
No one knows the meaning of pain who has not suffered jealousy. The iron entered into Diane’s soul when she overheard Grandin saying to his wife that the new girl would soon be as good an actress as Diane, and was much handsomer, which was the truth. And everybody was so taken up with rehearsing Mademoiselle Rose; Diane felt herself already thrust out from that ideal world of the stage which to her was the real world. True, the anticipated joy of being married to the man she adored lost none of its delicious charm, its soft seductiveness, but with it was mingled much real suffering, and a strange and awful dislocation of life.
In those three weeks, Diane was so torn by powerful emotions of all sorts, love, pain, grief, jealousy, fear, triumph, and a thousand other minor things, that she neither ate nor slept, and grew even thinner than ever. And Mademoiselle Rose was so fresh and fair! Nevertheless, Diane’s acting did not suffer. On the contrary, like the poor princess who had burning needles in her shoes, Diane was keyed up to do better work than ever in her life. Never had been her comedy so good. Off the stage, she had no more humor than a cat; on the stage, she could throw an audience into spasms of merriment. Her voice, too, had in it a celestial thrill that made her little songs move to laughter or bring to tears as never before.
The Marquis was often at the music hall in those evenings, and Diane unconsciously played directly at him.
Every night, as she made up before her little scrap of a mirror in the canvas den, she would think to herself, as a condemned person thinks of the day of execution:
“There are but ten more nights for me.”
And the next night:
“There are but nine left.”
As to the Marquis’ visits, which Diane rigidly fixed at two a week, and had her own way about it, as she always did, they, like everything else in the extraordinary time, were full of joy and pain. First, was the joy of being with him, of hearing his delightful voice, and seeing him in his beautiful uniform, and the stupendous triumph of it all to her.
At these visits, Madame Grandin, frightened half to death, was always present. Diane invariably rose in a stately manner at the end of half an hour—her book of etiquette prescribed that—and the Marquis, acting just as the book said all fiancés should, complained bitterly of being turned out, and promised reprisals.
It was a strange time to all who were drawn within the whirlpool of emotion that dashed them around in a circle of agitation, stunned and amazed them, made them to be envied and pitied, and in short, as François said, they were exhibited as the puppets of the great God.